Conveyor belts are well known as an efficient means for conveying materials or products, and have found widespread use in a variety of applications and environments. In many operations, the conveyor belt is repeatedly flexed during each conveyor cycle. The belt flexes between an upturned, trough-shaped configuration which the belt attains while transporting material above the advancing rollers to prevent spillage of material over the side of the conveyor, and a flat configuration which the belt attains during its return path on the underside of the rollers. In such conveyors, the hinge pin will also be flexed and straightened repeatedly into and from a trough-like configuration.
To accommodate the heavy loads that may be encountered in industrial conveyor belt applications and the large forces that are transmitted through the conveyor belt, it is often necessary to join the ends of the conveyor belt by hinged belt fasteners rather than weaker means, such as sewing or bonding. This usually includes a strip of belt fasteners attached to each end of the conveyor belt and held together by a hinge pin, which is threaded through interleaved U-shaped portions of the adjacent belt fasteners to extend the width of the conveyor belt.
Present designs usually incorporate a length of cable formed of wire strands, which provides increased flexibility over a solid metal pin to allow the conveyor belt to conform to the shape of a trough where the belt ends are joined. Hinge pin failure, which disables the conveyor belt, is very costly in terms of downtime of the overall operation or process.
Merely cutting a long cable into shorter sections produces hinge pins having frayed ends or ends which will readily fray upon usage. The frayed ends make it difficult to thread the hinge pin through the overlapping hoops of adjacent belt fasteners. Also, the frayed hinge pin ends result in an increased rate of wear of the belt in the region of the hinge pin ends. With the aforementioned flexing which the hinge pins experience, and the heavy loads often required to be transported by the belt and hence borne by the hinge pins, the hinge pin ends become increasingly frayed during their lifespan, which further increases the rate of wear of the belt at the hinge pin ends.
One current method for reducing the fray of the hinge pin ends provides for dipping the ends of the hinge pin in a braze following cutting. Since the braze only reaches the exterior strands of the hinge pin, the interior strands are not bonded and thus the hinge pin still has a tendency to fray after prolonged use. Additionally, the braze dipping adds additional thickness to the ends of the hinge pin which makes it more difficult to thread the hinge pin through the overlapping belt fastener hoops. Moreover, the separate cutting and dipping operations are time consuming, with the increased operator time resulting in increased production costs.
It is desired to provide a method for sectioning an elongated length of cable into a plurality of shorter hinge pins which forms the separate hinge pins in such a manner that the hinge pins lend themselves to use with overlapping hoop-type belt fasteners of conveyor belts, particularly so as to facilitate easy threading of the hinge pins through the belt fastener hoops and prevent fraying of the hinge pin ends during usage which might reduce belt life.